In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Exceptionalism of Diversity
  • I. Gerasimov (bio), S. Glebov, A. Kaplunovski, M. Mogilner, and A. Semyonov

Ab Imperio's annual theme is always an experiment. There is always a gap between the bullet points of our annual program and the research foci of a given issue's authors. Looking at the table of contents of the issue that was just assembled, it is informative to see which aspects of our annual theme are actively studied and which remain in the shadows. However, it seems we have never faced such a stark and telling contrast between the expected focus of the materials in the journal and the articles finally accepted for publication.

Our annual program in 2012 was formulated as "Structures and Cultures of Imperial and Post-Imperial Diversity," and the current issue's focus was "Varieties of Exceptionalism." Presumably, the issue was to focus on the parallel existence of alternative "maps of diversity" in the imperial situation, where social, national, political, economic, and other differences overlap and produce complex social identities and spaces of belonging. "Exception" in one system of coordinates could be a norm or a regular practice in another. In any event, in the region that is studied by the authors of AI, exception is often business as usual (temporary rules and regulations, special missions, and special departments). Exceptions are the norm here, and this was equally true about the Russian Empire, which had no particular universal ideological framework, and about the USSR, in which a striving for uniformity and sameness was a function of the universal class ideology. Furthermore, Soviet universalism was often fed by the conception of evolutionary differences: what is an exception for one historical period can be a norm for another. [End Page 16]

However, suffice it to look at the current issue's table of contents to see that the sociological retrospective normalization of exceptionalism as a phenomenon of the past has nothing to do with the historical experience of living through exceptions and exclusions. Exceptions in most of the articles in this issue are treated in the context of trauma, discrimination, and violence.

Perhaps, the effect of the contrast with expectations emerged because the analytical recognition of "normalcy" of exceptions in the imperial situation somehow makes one expect the equally routine attitude toward diversity and exceptions from inside the imperial (or post-imperial) society as well. There is a real theoretical and ethical danger of romanticizing the principle of strategic exceptionalism, upon which the functioning of empire was based. This is a danger of constructing some kind of an "ideal" multiculturalism of the past. The materials published in this issue warn against exactly this kind of romanticizing because they demonstrate the importance of taking into account inequalities and power asymmetries, which always accompany exceptions and exclusions. Together, these articles show how utopian it is to expect the coexistence of many social, cultural, ethnic, and political spaces within one polity to be devoid of problems and conflicts. The question that is central to the authors in this issue of Ab Imperio is: What mechanisms help to resolve the contradictions that emerge in the process of living through the historical experience of diversity.

Our "History" section opens with the article by Olga Mastianica, who explores how educational institutions on the territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania formed "women's" social role in the mid-nineteenth century. In the complex cultural and political situation in the Western bor­derlands of the Russian Empire, the seemingly "fundamental" gender status differentiated into an array of "exceptional" situations and statuses defined by anti-Polish and anti-Jewish policies, and selective privileging of the nobility and Orthodoxy, which came into contradiction with the policies of discrimination of the Polish elite or the lower classes. In a certain sense, the same subversive potential of women (despite the ascribed roles of "guard­ians of tradition" and "foundation of nation") Sophie Roche discusses in the "Anthropology" section in her article on the narratives of memory about the civil war of the 1990s in Tajikistan. The suppressed and marginalized ("exceptional") women's perspective clashes with the official political and national canons of memory.

Returning to the "History" section, Timothy K. Blauvelt tells...

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